More on noir…
I THOROUGHLY enjoyed Joel
Lane’s review of noir fiction in Socialism Today No.132, October 2009.
One of the reasons I like this genre is that in contrast to the
traditional crime ‘whodunit’ as typified by Agatha Christie, noir
fiction is more likely to feature ordinary people living everyday lives.
Often the hero or heroine would be struggling to survive, trapped in a
nightmare world of crime as an accessory, or as a victim. Even the
criminals tended to be small scale ‘grifters’, sandwiched between
organised crime and corrupt cops. Often the ‘hero’ of the story will not
even be aware of their predicament until it hits them smack on the head.
In the same way that John
Steinbeck exposed the ‘American Dream’ in mainstream novels like Grapes
of Wrath and Of Mice and Men so the noir writers reveal a picture of
America that shows its rottenness, corruption and irrationality. An
increasingly literate working class readership who bought these books in
their tens of millions in the 1940s and 50s could easily identify with
the plots and characters. This was the generation that had battled
against the capitalist depression of the 1930s, the carnage of the
second world war, and the paranoia and bureaucracy of the post-war
period.
Not surprisingly, the
politics of some of the noir writers were left wing. Jim Thompson,
mentioned in Joel’s article and arguably the best known to a modern
audience through films such as The Grifters, was a case in point. He was
certainly sympathetic to if not a member of the Communist Party. His own
experiences in the 1930s as an itinerant worker in Oklahoma and later as
an oil worker in Texas informed his outlook on the brutality and
corruption of life in the USA.
Another writer of interest is
Bruno Fischer. He was a member of the American Socialist Party, editing
Socialist Call in the 1930s and standing for the New York senate in 1939
on behalf of the party. Fischer is less well known but his novels stand
up well.
Allegedly, one of his series characters (PI Ben Helm) was
based on Norman Thomas, the American socialist leader and three-time
presidential candidate (1940, 1944 and 1948). The New York Times Book
Review critic Anthony Boucher once wrote that Fischer had "a fine sense
of the impinging of crime and violence on ordinary life, a biting
handling of the economic factors in human motivation".
Of course not all hardboiled
and noir writers were socialists. Tony Aitman in his letter in Socialism
Today No.134, Dec-Jan 2009-10, identifies Mickey Spillane as being
"somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan". This is true but his first
breakthrough novel, I, the Jury, is a masterpiece of hardboiled writing.
It has been vilified by liberals because the ‘hero’ of the story – Mike
Hammer – is forced to act violently outside the law due to the
corruption or inability of the police to solve the murder of Hammer’s
best friend from the second world war.
Written in 1947, the context
is important. Demobbed soldiers who were treated as heroes in 1945, had
been largely forgotten by 1947. The ideals of justice and peace that
they had fought and died for had been ignored by the bourgeois
politicians of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Mike Hammer
cuts through the bureaucracy of the official justice system, acting as
judge, jury and executioner. Not surprisingly workers identified with
Hammer and Spillane’s books sold in their millions.
Raymond Chandler was
extremely critical of Spillane but Chandler’s view of the world, for all
the cynical wisecracks of his main character, Philip Marlow, was a
romantic one. Spillane in I, the Jury was a populist and he reflected
the brutal experience and outlook of the generation that had fought in
Europe and the Pacific. Spillane’s later works unfortunately were
infected with McCarthyist venom, and he and his main character Mike
Hammer became literary defenders of the American establishment.
It is possible to see
parallels between what happened to Spillane’s Mike Hammer stories and an
iconic film character from the 1980s. In the first Rambo film First
Blood, Sylvester Stallone’s character Rambo is a victim of American
imperialism. Having created a ‘killing machine’ to carry out its war in
Vietnam, the bourgeois politicians were not interested in investing in
rehabilitating back into civilian society Rambo and hundreds of
thousands of other soldiers who had served in Vietnam. The first Rambo
film is a bitter attack on the morality of US imperialism. As the series
developed however, under the Reagan presidency, Rambo was transformed
from a victim of US imperialism into an international symbol of US
imperialism.
In both Spillane’s books and
the Rambo films, the capitalist class recognized the power of populist
characters and the affect they could have on a wide audience. Both I,
The Jury and the first Rambo film reflected important social concerns.
Through their ownership and control of the media, the capitalist class
were able to steer both Mickey Spillane and Rambo away from those
concerns on to a different pro-establishment agenda.
A democratically run
nationalised film and publishing industry would be the way to ensure
that working class aspirations and concerns are reflected in film and
book.
Mick Whale
, 